Legends Football League team relocating to Toledo

Toledo’s Huntington Center will be the new home of a Legends Football League (LFL) team.

The league announced Dec. 17 its Cleveland Crush franchise will be moving to Toledo.

The women’s 7-on-7 tackle football league, which started in 2009, was formerly known as the Lingerie Football League. Players wear helmets, shoulder pads and cleats — but little else.

League founder and chairman Mitchell Mortaza is enthusiastic about the move, and said Toledo will be a good location for the team.

“Cleveland is an incredible sports town and the Q Arena is one of the finest arenas in the country. While it was an incredible combination for us, it simply did not fit within our business model moving forward,” Mortaza said in a news release. “Toledo and specifically the Huntington Center is an incredible setting for LFL Football and it also provides proximity to draw athletes, coaches and fans not only from Toledo but Cleveland and Detroit as well.”

The team will be called the Cleveland Crush of Toledo, according to Tyler DeHaven of the league’s media relations office.

The LFL features teams in the United States and Australia and will expand into Europe in 2015.

Huntington Center General Manager Steve Miller said the LFL approached the Toledo venue.

“The Huntington Center offers a wide variety of programming. We look forward to a successful relationship with the LFL,” Miller said in a news release.

The team will play two home games at Huntington Center: May 10 and June 21. Tickets are on sale now at www.ticketmaster.com, at (800) 745-3000 or at the Huntington Center box office.

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Lighting the Fuse

Retail observations

There are a lot of factors that help people determine whether to patronize a business. Price, of course. Variety and quality of merchandise. As gasoline prices rise, proximity becomes a more prominent determinant.

For many people, none of these elements is as important as customer service. I will go out of my way and pay a little more if I trust and respect the people at a business.

I may be a feet-on-the-desk, Tetris-playing, Internet-surfing, soft-hands, two-hour-lunch-taking, beach-combing, slacker editor now, but for many years, I actually had to work for a living. There was a long stint working for the Bob Evans restaurant chain, plus stints in furniture sales, bookstore stock shelving, UPS box loading and a number of jobs that required various combinations of physical labor and customer service. Having been on the receiving end of abuse from malevolent bosses and parsimonious customers, I know how difficult the working man’s (and woman’s) life is. I maintain great respect for the people who work service and retail jobs, especially in restaurants and places that require a lot of contact with the public. I understand that people who work on their feet catering to egomaniacal customers and unpleasant attitudes can have bad days, and they have to be really offensive to get under my skin.

But I do have a few customer service pet peeves, and I encountered a number of them during a recent day of running and playing. Two college friends and I meet three or four times a year to see a concert or a movie and to inflict major damage upon a number of restaurants’ food supplies. We gathered in Toledo on April 23 for just such a guys’ day out, joking, catching up and reliving some of our college-era camaraderie.

We started in Monroe at Pete’s Garage, a restaurant with as many TV screens as Best Buy, several actual antique cars that serve as seating booths and a Hall of Fame appetizer menu. Our general practice is to order an embarrassing number of appetizers to place on the table, then share and graze. Pete’s Garage is an ideal setting for such indulgences.

We were seated in the center of the restaurant’s east wing. There is a second floor on that side that holds two of the antique cars that kids and families love to eat in. As we waited, one of the jean-shorts-clad young waitresses took some cleaning supplies upstairs. To clean the rear windshield, she had to climb on the trunk on her hands and knees to spray and clean the car’s glass. I assume she was at least old enough to serve alcohol, and while I greatly appreciate being as close as I will ever be to a ZZ Top video shoot, it was disconcerting to see her on display with so many kids and families in the restaurant. As I hurtle through my mid-40s, I am discovering that there is an increasingly thin line between passively appreciating a pretty woman and feeling like a leering, wolf-muzzle drooling dirty old man.

I crisscrossed that line with darting eyes for the few minutes she washed the car, and was grateful I sitting with college buddies and not my kids.

One of our stops in Toledo was a pre-Easter run through the Monroe Street Toys ‘R’ Us. As one of my friends went through the checkout line, he heard a conversation between two store employees. One of them asked when the air conditioning would be turned on in the warm store, and when told it would not be during the current shift, replied, “We’ll be sweating like Hebrews in the summer.”

I did not take the time to research the scientific evidence behind such a statement, but it was shocking enough to hear the account when we were back in the car; I have no idea how I would have reacted had I been standing there when the racist comment was uttered. I am more inclined to confrontation than the friend who heard the comment, but I also understand the “flight” reaction in “fight or flight.”

After an afternoon appetizer binge at Famous Dave’s, where we had a perfect experience, we went to the Huntington Center for the Gregg Allman/Steve Miller concert. It is not often that my two friends and I separate an event from food, but we were so dangerously close to food-aversion therapy levels from our day’s bacchanal that not even beverages offered much appeal.

Not wanting the fun and games to end, we stopped at the Sylvania BW3. It was nearing midnight, but the ghosts of Pete’s Garage and Famous Dave’s lingered. It was too late for caffeine and too late to eat. One of my friends and I were hoping for a small milkshake to neutralize the barbecue fires, but all BW3 offered was a scoop of vanilla ice cream. So our total table order consisted of three glasses of water, two scoops of vanilla ice cream and one order of “Asian Zing” boneless chicken wings for our more ambitious partner.

When the meager order arrived, it was not delivered by our waiter, but by a manager who was trying to be humorous but failed.

“I just had to see who ordered this,” he said. “I’ve never seen this. I expected to see a pregnant woman out here.”

It’s a minor pet peeve on the scale of annoyances, but I hate being made to feel like I need to defend a purchase. I hate it when a grocery store clerk comments on my choices, I hate it when a waiter openly judges my tastes and I especially hate it when a manager makes a freak show about my order. Not only did he get a big chuckle out of our end-of-day surrender to a day of profligacy, he stopped by a second time to bring it up again. None of us said anything; we all know it’s not cool to beat up on people who work as hard as restaurant and service people do. It’s just one more story to tell about awkward customer service and the choices we make when we have dollars to spend.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Email him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Miller time: Rock legend to play Huntington Center April 23

There was the bluesy psychedelic rock/pop period from 1967 through 1972 that produced five albums that gained him considerable credibility as a songwriter and guitarist, but little in the way of commercial success.

Then beginning with the 1973 album, “The Joker,” came the pop era that saw Miller become one of the most popular artists in rock music. With subsequent albums such as “Fly Like An Eagle,” “Book Of Dreams” and “Abracadabra,” Miller reeled off radio hit after radio hit, sold some 13 million records and went from playing theaters to stadiums.

Miller, who will play the Huntington Center on April 23 with Gregg Allman, certainly considers “The Joker” album a turning point in his career. But he says the kind of pop songs that made him a king of radio — “Fly Like An Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Jungle Love” and “Rockin’ Me” — were nothing new for him.

The transition from blues-influenced rocker to master pop craftsman was something Miller had been working on since before he moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s and became part of a Bay Area scene that was introducing the world to the likes of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

“I had been working on pop tunes and stuff from the early ‘60s (on),” Miller said in a recent phone interview. “I always liked pop-blues, R&B and Motown, anything that really sounded good. And there were lots of really great sounding hits … So I was always writing four-part harmony tunes and working on stuff like that.”

“The Joker” arrived at a time when Miller had nearly given up on becoming a major star. He had been on the road or in the studio pretty much nonstop for seven years, and the grind had taken its toll. He was selling about 200,000 albums a year — an impressive total — but he wasn’t on the radio or making enough money to enjoy anything resembling a good living.

“I was just on the road all the time, but not really making enough money to buy a house or do anything,” Miller said. “The tax rate back then was 88 percent. It was insane. So I was keeping 12 cents on the dollar.”

Before starting what he thought might be his final tour, Miller was told by someone at his record company that he thought “The Joker” was a hit. Miller brushed it aside. His major concern was that Capitol Records would have his albums in the stores in cities along his tour route — something that often didn’t happen on his previous tours.

Steve Miller has been recording and touring since 1967.

When he returned from the tour, Miller still didn’t know “The Joker” had become a hit single.

“There was a check for $385,000 in my mailbox when I got back,” Miller said, remembering his shock over his sudden financial windfall.

He hasn’t had to worry about finances since, as albums like “Fly Like An Eagle,” “Book Of Dreams” and “Abracadabra,” gave him hit singles and a fan base that continues to fill amphitheaters every time Miller tours.

Miller understands the lasting appeal of songs such as “Jet Airliner” and “Fly Like An Eagle.”

“What it is, is it’s a great song that everybody could sing,” he said. “It’s got great harmony in it, it’s got a really good (basic) track and it’s fun. That’s what I was trying to do. I wasn’t trying to make something for radio. I was trying to make something that was going to make radio something good.”

Miller isn’t just reflecting on the stadium-filling days of his career these days. On April 19, he releases the CD “Let Your Hair Down,” which like his 2010 CD, “Bingo,” celebrates his roots in blues and R&B.

Those were the styles of music that Miller first pursued after he arrived in Chicago in 1964, just as that city’s blues scene was in its final glory days. Miller has plenty of memories of the Chicago clubs, his gigs and especially seeing and getting to know blues greats such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and James Cotton, who played nightly in clubs that often held only 125 people or so.

“They were just working every night,” Miller said. “I saw Muddy a hundred times, you know, I mean, ‘Wow!’”

Miller and keyboardist Barry Goldberg formed a band and became a fixture in the clubs. Then the Miller-Goldberg Band was signed by Epic Records and went to New York for a few months. When he came back to Chicago around Christmas of 1965, the blues scene was dead, as all of the main stars had gotten the chance to go on tour.

Miller acutely understood why the musicians left Chicago, and he quickly followed suit, relocating to San Francisco.

“As soon as everybody got famous, they stopped working in clubs,” said Miller, noting fights and shootings were common during shows. “Who wants to work in a club? That was from nine at night until four in the morning for $200 a week if you were Muddy Waters and $125 a week if you were me. So everybody was really glad to get the hell out of there.”

Needless to say, Miller has been playing his music in much more hospitable environments ever since his Chicago days, with theaters, arenas and outdoor amphitheaters again the common venues on this year’s tour.

Miller’s exceptional band is back for this run, with singer Sonny Charles, formerly of the group the Checkmates, in the lineup.

“He’s a great, great singer,” Miller said. “It’s kind of like having Otis Redding join the band. He’s that good.”

Charles was part of the recording session three years ago that produced the material for both the “Let Your Hair Down” and “Bingo” CDs, as was harmonica player Norton Buffalo, Miller’s right hand man in his band for 33 years until he died of cancer in October of 2009.

“We went into Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, (filmmaker George) Lucas’ place where he records all the ‘Star Wars’ soundtracks,” Miller said. “We got Andy Johns to be our engineer. He’s done all the Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums. And we cut 41 of these tracks.”

Miller went into the session not even worrying about whether the recordings would ever be released, and he sat on the tracks until he found the right record deal for the two CDs — with Roadrunner/Loud & Proud Records.

“My thinking was I just wanted to get these 41 great songs recorded. I wasn’t worried about whether they came out or what,” Miller said. “I had the band all dialed in. We had all the right amps and equipment. We were there to have a great time and we did. And when it came out, it was so much better than we thought it would be.

“We’re kicking it,” he said. “Andy’s recording, it’s every guitar player’s dream to have Andy Johns record the band and it’s the biggest bass, drums and guitar sound you ever heard in your life.”

Newsmakers 2010: Encore!: Huntington Center

Toledo’s newest major entertainment venue got a new name and brought new life to the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Huron Street this year.

The $105 million structure formerly known as Lucas County Arena opened in October 2009 and was rechristened Huntington Center on April 16.

As the first full calendar year of Toledo Walleye hockey, big-name concerts and popular attractions draws to a close, the executives who operate the arena and its tenants have declared the 270,000-square-foot venue an overwhelming success.

“The community has come out and supported the building wholeheartedly,” said Steve Miller, general manager of the Huntington Center and SeaGate Convention Centre. Miller works for SMG, the venue management company that operates both Downtown sites.

“I think there’s going to be more good events to come down the road because everyone’s supporting the venue,” he said.

The final event for 2010 is the Walleye game Dec. 29. Huntington Center hosted 105 total events this year, Miller said.

Two of the most popular events took place during the same weekend earlier in the spring. Country star Carrie Underwood played in front of 7,820 fans on April 24, and Elton John performed for 8,640 onlookers the next day. John’s concert was the best-attended event at the Huntington Center in 2010.

“He really likes to play in new buildings, so that came about pretty quickly,” Miller said. “The community came out in support, and it did very well.”

Hometown heroine Crystal Bowersox returned to Northwest Ohio as part of the “American Idol” tour Aug. 29. The Toledo concert was a bright spot in what proved to be a lackluster tour. More than 7,300 fans came out for the show.

“That was a testament to Crystal Bowersox,” Miller said. “We were one of the better-selling dates of the tour.”

The Eagles visited the venue on Oct. 20 and drew 8,292 fans, the second-highest number to attend an event at the arena in 2010.

The Walleye capped a successful inaugural season in April. The team won 22 of its 36 home games and qualified for the East Coast Hockey League playoffs.

The franchise earned the ECHL’s Team Award of Excellence for its “well-rounded business plan including, but not limited to, sales, marketing, media relations and merchandising while also distinguishing themselves in their community, on and off the ice.”

Hockey fans warmly greeted the sport’s return to the Glass City. The home opener on Oct. 17 drew 8,000 spectators — the venue can seat 7,500 for hockey games. The Walleye brought 226,575 patrons to the Huntington Center during the 2009-10 season. That figure broke Toledo’s single-season record by nearly 50,000 fans.

“The intimacy, the cozy feel, the sidelines are extraordinary. The acoustics make it very loud, so when the Walleye score a goal the building is very loud,” said Walleye general manager Joe Napoli, who also oversees the Toledo Mud Hens.

In all, 381,976 fans attended an event at Huntington Center in 2010. That figure does not include the Dec. 29 Walleye game or non-Walleye events in December.

The Huntington Center has booked a number of concerts for 2011. Kid Rock will perform on Jan. 26. He last performed in Toledo at the SeaGate Centre in 2008, and a full house is expected when he returns.

Rush will come to the Glass City on April 6. Miller said the band played Toledo Sports Arena in 1982 and has not returned since. Tickets are still available.

Keith Urban will make his Northwest Ohio debut July 29. Four major country acts performed at the Huntington Center in 2010, and Miller said he hopes Urban’s show will lead to future success.

“I think that that’s going to be another great country act that’s going to lead to more large country acts coming into the market,” he said.